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Procrastination And Fatigue – A Deadly Combination

How do you make an easy task difficult? Simple. You put it off and you keep postponing it until it eventually becomes a big deal. It’s one thing to procrastinate on the small things, but it’s quite another to procrastinate on the big issues in life. You can trace almost all your personal problems back to the failure to take effective and timely action.

The effects of procrastination are mostly indirect and often far reaching. One of the most devastating effects of procrastination is fatigue. In fact, procrastination and fatigue goes hand in hand. Procrastination is not only the result, but also the cause of fatigue. Because of procrastination you keep postponing important tasks and because you postpone it you become fatigued. There is a big difference between being tired and being fatigued. Fatigue is emotional and mental while tiredness is mostly physical. Getting enough rest can solve the problem of being tired, but it won’t really do much for fatigue.

We all have a mental capacity which determines how much we can comfortably deal with in our lives. Everything that’s ‘on your mind’ is something that you have to deal with on a mental and emotional level. When you deal with it you feel a sense of accomplishment and you feel like a load has been taken off your proverbial shoulders. In reality, this sense of relief is the result of offloading some of your emotional load by dealing, and completing some task that was on your mind.

Everything that you feel like you have to do has got some value to you. We only procrastinate about the things we care about – otherwise it’s won’t concern us whether we do it or not. It’s only when we fail to take action that procrastination sets in. Every time you fail to take action and complete a task you fail to offload what’s on your mind. This tends to add to your ‘emotional load’ and since we all have a limited capacity, we tend to feel fatigued.

Fatigue can lead to more serious issues, ranging from depression to sleeplessness to a loss of self confidence. When you procrastinate you can easily turn the simplest task into a mountain and the more you think about it the harder it gets. Now you have to climb a mountain in your mind every time you think about doing it and every time you fail to act on it your mountain gets bigger and your fatigue get worse. Although procrastination and fatigue

The most important things to remember when you suffer from fatigue due to procrastination is that a sense of accomplishment is self reinforcing. Every time you finish a task you feel good and it’s this feeling good that motivates you to do more and to be more effective. It’s one of the most effective ways to conquer procrastination. More than anything, procrastination is an emotion – it’s a feeling and by taking charge of your emotional state you can take back control and empower yourself to take action and complete what you know you ‘must’ do. Unfortunately this fact is also responsible for fatigue. When you fail to complete a task, or worse, when you fail to even start, you create the opposite effect. You feel bad and you tend to act on this feeling which is what keeps you from approaching the task in the future.

Procrastination and fatigue is a cycle and the one tends to lead to the next and because it’s so self reinforcing it tends to keep many people tied up in an immobilized state of mind where they can’t seem to make any real progress. One of the simplest ways to snap out of this patterns is to design some simple task that you can easily complete and to gradually build your emotional strength. If you are procrastinating on something, break it up into three or four simpler tasks and then focus only on one at a time – forget about the rest. Each time you complete one you will ‘offload’ a bit of emotional baggage, your load will feel lighter and your sense of accomplishment will motivate you to do more.

Procrastination is like running on an emotional treadmill – you keep running but you are not going anywhere. It only leads to an emotional tiredness or fatigue that can greatly jeopardize your sense of well being, your level of motivation and your personal happiness. We all have a desire to progress with our lives and we at the back of our minds we all know what we can do to move forward and make our lives better, When we don’t act on these ideas we feel a certain strain which comes from the knowing that we are not advancing. This strain contributes to fatigue and adds to your emotional load that you have to carry around with you. We all carry a little ‘to-do list’ around in the back of our minds. Ever time something comes along that you ‘have to do’ it automatically gets added. As a general rule, the longer your list, the more fatigue you will experience.

To effectively deal with fatigue you simply need to off-load your ‘emotional load’. You have to deal with everything that’s on your mind. And the most effective way to do it is to deal with it one by one. Start with the tasks you are procrastinating most about as they will give you the greatest sense of accomplishment. Procrastination makes an easy task hard, but action makes a hard task easy. Just do it. Break it up into smaller simpler tasks and just do it piece by piece. It’s ironic, but the more you do the more you can do. The more you do the less emotional baggage you have - the lighter your load, the more you can carry. The wonderful fact about procrastination and fatigue is that when you eliminate the procrastination, you can eliminate the fatigue. Be kind to yourself. Free yourself from procrastination. Free Yourself from fatigue!